Reminds me of that time when Joshua Bell played in a subway with an incredibly expensive violin. They showed people just walking past, not knowing at all what they're missing. When I saw that I thought, "what the hell is he trying to prove?"
You always need to adapt your art to the medium and provide contrast. To do otherwise is to argue against reality. Your average run-of-the-mill street performer is always going to get more attention than Joshua Bell will on the street.
Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post set this up and wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning article about it. It's a great article, "Pearls Before Breakfast":
Try not to let this article turn you off Weingarten's work — I think this story was meant to be a bit "fun".
For something more serious, check out Weingarten's thought-provoking feature piece about dead children — "Fatal Distraction", http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2009-03-08/news/36840402_... . His story does a good job of (1) telling stories about tragic accidents where children were forgotten in the back of cars and died; (2) showing that the key factor in whether or not the parents were prosecuted was not the facts of the situation but instead which prosecutor's district the deaths occurred in; (3) finding a surprising explanation for the increase in these accidents — rear-facing car seats. Given the subject matter, it's neither smug nor glib, and so you might prefer it to his subway violin story.
At least give the author the benefit of the doubt. I've never lived anywhere near Washington D.C. but a quick search reveals the station is anything but "plebeian":
Did you read the article? Is the smug tone some kind of joke that I'm not getting? Because based on my own reading the author really does judge the commuters for not stopping, and the use of "plebeian" was not in jest.
I think you're going out of your way to sound sophisticated by pretending you "get it".
I thought the real lesson of that episode was "most people on the DC metro in the early morning hours are probably commuters in a bit of a rush to get to work on time." Perhaps an evening concert in the same venue would have been more productive...
You always need to adapt your art to the medium and provide contrast. To do otherwise is to argue against reality. Your average run-of-the-mill street performer is always going to get more attention than Joshua Bell will on the street.